Monday, August 30, 2010

Heads up for any Poe fans

I'm a rabid Poe fan. Just thought I would pass this along to others out there who have a fondness for all things Poe. There is word from John Cusack's Twitter feed that he will be playing Edgar Allan Poe in a film called the Raven. With the success of the film "Sherlock Holmes", it's a good bet that this film will be an action packed film too, and I think Cusack is a wonderful choice for the role. Let's hope there is a corresponding jump in readers of Poe's books and poems. That would be nice.

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs

The Mitford series by Jan Karon

The Stand by Stephen King

This quote from Eudora Welty captures perfectly how I feel about books and reading

"I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."

Get Caught Reading

Want to find time to read? Fall in book love. Seek out the books that fire your passions. Follow your intellect and your heart. Then time will find you....Steve Leveen

Stop thinking this is all there is...

Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage and environmental devastation, there are a thousand counter-balancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world, right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral.

Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel.

Realize that this is the perfect moment to change the energy of the world, to step right up and crank your personal volume; right when it all seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious...there's your opening!

And, finally, believe you are part of a groundswell, a resistance, a seemingly small but actually very, very large impending karmic overhaul, a great shift, the beginning of something important and potent and unstoppable.

...Mark Morford, Newspaper Columnist and Yoga Instructor

CONAN THE LIBRARIAN

Quiet Please!

I read as if time were running out, because technically it is. As I grow older, I find I'm increasingly impatient with mediocre entertainments: I want books that will take my breath away and realign my vision...Barbara Kingsolver

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill...Barbara Techman (Writer)

Library

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul...Samuel Ullman

Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order...John Adams, 2nd President of the U.S.

Every page allows me to live in the main character's thoughts and marvel at how all of us who grew up poor and female are bonded, regardless of where we were raised or who raised us. I not only feel I know this person, but I also recognize more of myself. That's just one of the great joys of reading. Insight, escape, information, knowledge, power. All that and more can come through a good book...If you're going to binge, literature is definitely the way to do it...Oprah Winfrey

Librarian

Barbara Kingsolver

"I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved."

For sure!

Asking a Librarian her favorite book is like asking a Mother her favorite child

So you want to become a librarian? Welcome to a vibrant and exciting profession. Click here.

Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl, Librarian

lol

The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen. Health and strength may fail. But what you have committed to your mind, is yours forever...Louis Lamour

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.Just get people to stop reading them...... Ray Bradbury

I LOVE NEIL GAIMAN

Do yourself a favor and read American Gods, Anansi Boys, Fragile Things, Smoke & Mirrors, The Graveyard Book, MirrorMask, or Good Omens

Love the Fantasy/SciFi genre

Many good authors to try, John Scalzi is one of the newer ones

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, interesting...Aldous Huxley

The Chronicles of Narnia are an excellent read!

I was an adult before I read these books...how sad...

BOOKS: The Other Channel

My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry. — Books in My Life Robert DOWNS (1903- )

A room without books is like a body without a soul......Marcus T. Cicero

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.......Gaston Bachelard

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. — Cosmos Carl SAGAN

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life. — Cited in ALA Bulletin, Oct. 1954, p.475Norman COUSINS(1915- )